Five years since starting the Science and Security Programme at King’s College London, nuclear expert Peter Zimmerman is retiring to Washington. He talks to Nature Network London about the difficulties of getting scientists and social scientists to collaborate.
Angela Saini
He’s a former US State Department science advisor on arms control and has been a national security insider for much of his life, so naturally there’s a lot Peter Zimmerman knows that people might want to find out. His latest comment in the New York Times, for example, warns about the security threat posed by radioactive caesium. With so much confidential information tucked away in his brain, it’s no surprise that he looks edgy when a voice recorder is switched on for an interview.
One question he can answer, at least, is why a physicist working on the risky frontiers of global security chose an apparently sedate life at King’s College London. In 2003, the Department of War Studies asked him to start a unique Science and Security programme, taking on one of the great challenges of academia—getting scientists to work with social scientists. Specifically, teaching international relations to physicists and engineers, while making politics graduates understand the principles behind nuclear bombs.
From physics to politics
“It was a great opportunity to start a new programme in a country that had never integrated scientific research with policy studies,” says Zimmerman. The one-year MA course takes on fewer than a dozen people a year. It was set up to plug the gap between international affairs and weapons technology by teaching people how weapons work and what their security implications are. With a background in nuclear physics and arms control, as well as a career spanning research and policy-making, Zimmerman was ideal for the job. And now, as he prepares to head back to the US, a year after reaching retirement age, he has no doubt that it was a cause worth crossing the pond for.
Zimmerman’s office demonstrates how far he has stretched himself between the worlds of physics and politics. There’s a copy of Foreign Policy magazine on the shelf, and a whiteboard on the floor, scrawled with the price of highly enriched uranium.
His interest in defence issues began the 1970s, while teaching at Louisiana State University. A nuclear power plant being built in the area attracted his attention when local activists made claims about possible river pollution. It turned his mind to a different abuse of nuclear waste—radioactive weapons—and he’s been fascinated by the politics of arms control ever since.
When he leaves later this month, Zimmerman’s shoes will be filled by Wyn Bowen, a non-proliferation and terrorism expert who has been with King’s Defence Studies Department since 1997.
A mutual misunderstanding
Spanning disciplines on the Science and Security course had its problems. “The non-scientists were always afraid of engaging with numbers and quantifying things,” says Zimmerman. Some of them were reluctant to admit they didn’t understand the science or maths parts of the course, which meant they fell behind.
The scientists and engineers, meanwhile, had to get their heads around the fact that the social sciences don’t rely on empiricism, even though these disciplines try to describe behaviour in a technical way. “What drives me crazy about international relations is that they call something a theory and they say it’s science, but it’s not falsifiable. If you come up with a situation where the theory doesn’t work, they say ‘so what?’” laughs Zimmerman.
“I feel that social scientists at least ought to understand that their discipline doesn’t have the rigour that physics or engineering have. They are using the language of science in a much fuzzier situation.”
The science–arts hierarchy
Zimmerman’s comments also betray some exasperation with a society that still seems to prize knowledge of politics and the arts over a basic understanding of science. He makes his point by quoting another scientist who crossed disciplinary boundaries: “CP Snow wrote The Two Cultures about 50 years ago,” he says, "which made the comment that, while he as a chemist would be thought illiterate if he didn’t know Shakespeare, a humanities student at a British University would be thought to be quite good if he were unable to explain the second law of thermodynamics.
“In a world in which, year after year, major international problems have greater and greater technical components to them, this is not a tenable situation,” he adds. Unsurprisingly, Zimmerman puts public fears over autism and the MMR jab, and recent unsubstantiated Wi-Fi health concerns, down to a lack of general scientific understanding.
Nevertheless, he doesn’t believe that teaching science to non-scientists is futile. “Al Gore certainly does not have a degree in science,” he says. “But I’d hate to stand up against him and argue climate change in science and numbers because he has mastered that science.”